It's time to prepare for a fall workshop, and this one will be about Music City. Rachel, my event manager, packed me off to Lower Broadway to paint my impressions of that exciting part of town.
After haggling with a couple of parking attendants, I found a deserted lot and abandoned my car. My painting gear fits into an REI wheelie-backpack, and off I marched pulling everything I needed in my wake. By the way, everything I needed was this: my French half-box easel, my full selection of colors, a small bottle of Liquin and a tiny metal container of Gamsol; brushes and painting knives; rags and baby wipes; a small sketchbook and pens; water, chocolate and sandwiches. In the trunk of the car I keep a Silicoil bottle with baby oil in it to preserve the brushes at the end of the day.
Ah, what shall I paint first? The Schermerhorn Symphony Center would be wonderful, with its classical architecture and outsize fountain ... modern Nashville as a backdrop. The Music City Star train station beside the river would be fun to paint. Maybe some of Nashville's favorite landmarks like the Ryman, home of the Grand Ole Opry... or the Country Music Hall of Fame.
But my attention was held, that day, by the street itself: Lower Broadway, lively with musicians and tourists, families and loners, hopes, dreams and especially song. I unfolded my easel right there in the middle of the sidewalk while beside me a truck driver unloaded kegs of beer.
The next couple of hours were magic. Plastic Elvis teetered on his plastic stand, balloons flying in the breeze. People walked and talked and gawked. The sun drifted lower in the sky, making the whole place sparkle. For the composition, I stuck someone in a cowboy hat into the foreground, and put in the parking meters marching up the right hand side.
"Is that painting for sale? My wife would like to buy it." Tempting, but this painting is not for sale. It has another purpose.
Earlier this week, I wrote about artistic license. When we paint with artistic license, we reinterpret our subject and analyze it as a combination of lines, masses, patterns etc. Then we freely use those elements as we see fit for our composition.
Another way to paint is almost the reverse. I'll call it "contemplative painting" because it's best done with a sense of mindfulness and peace. This little study is one example:
In Contemplative Painting, the artist does edit and select, but the main purpose is to look more and more deeply into the subject. As the artist loses track of time he begins to see the flow of light over and around the subject; the way light bounces back into the objects and reflects off the surroundings. Painting this way, you will become wonderfully aware of the miracle of seeing.
This is best done with still life painting, because you won't be rushed. When painting outside, you will always have fleeting effects to capture -- it's delightful but it's a different way to paint. When you are painting from reference, whether photo or sketch, you are back to re-interpreting what you see. And portrait painting involves the interaction with another person... or, again, a photo.
Even within the discipline of representational art, we find as many approaches as there are artists. Isn't it great to be creative?
Sometimes I'm a slow learner. I know artistic license has to do with moving things around and leaving things out. I know we can't paint every leaf and twig, so we only paint something that serves to remind us of what leaves and twigs look like. Also, maybe our landscape is marred by litter. Well, we don't have to paint the litter just because it's there!
For a while, I felt kind of like I was lying when I left out things like litter. It was as if I was showing a place as more beautiful than it really is.
It took me years to realize that all these details -- twigs, litter, etc. -- are really nothing more than elements of design. A tree, for instance, can be a mass or it can be a collection of lines. The leaves can be a mass or perhaps a pattern. The litter itself can serve as a pattern in my composition.
This cottage is inhabited by people who like plaster lawn ornaments. I am not a plaster lawn ornament person, so my first inclination was to leave them out. But as the composition developed, it became clear that it needed more than just the house and tree. This is a loosely-rendered painting, so that gave me the freedom to include spots of dark or light where I needed them (inspired by the lawn ornaments)... and the viewer can decide what they represent.
I used another bit of artistic license in the foreground. In reality, this was entirely asphalt. There is nothing wrong with that -- many Impressionist painters have used wet asphalt to great advantage. The problem with the asphalt in this case is that it covered about a third of the picture with a large, blank, flat shape.
This composition needed a dramatic sweep upward to the tree, so I just put that in. Who cares what it is... you can decide.
Oh man what a day.
A lot of artists seem like flakes, and lots of "left-brain, right-brain" jokes are made about us. The fact is, a fair number of artists actually do have a brain glitch called Discalculia. Yours truly is one of those lucky people.
Discalculia is caused by a few missing brain cells -- the ones that handle little things like numbers, places and, for some reason, names. This causes us artist types to show up at the wrong time at the wrong place to meet with the wrong person. Works havoc with job interviews, let me tell you!
Birthdays get missed, bank accounts get overdrawn ... and the IRS -- well let's just say I let my accountant handle the IRS!
The day we finished the Cummins Falls project, I set aside whatever time it would take to get my tax information to my accountant. The other accountant in my life -- my most awesome fiance -- had me set up with Quicken but that does not a foolproof tax experience make. Therefor I was still fiddling with it today, long after we had finished the Cummins show.
Whilst perched in front of my monitor on a rainy day, I became aware of a chill in the air. Being the modern American that I am, I simply bumped up the thermostat.
Chill stayed in the air.
Thermostat .... non responsive.
Hmm.
My house is over 100 years old, and the basement door is outside. So it was with no small degree of trepidation that I donned my rain gear and wrestled the cellar door (a bulkhead with no hinges) off the entrance.
I gazed into the descending darkness. Spiderwebs crisscrossed the maw of the ancient basement. I saw black, shiny, round spiders and many egg cases. Time for the broom.
After whisking away the webs, I braved the slippery stone steps... and met water. Oh no. The sump pump had failed. My basement -- and furnace -- were flooded.
My neighbor is a wonderful man who was home with a cold. He lent me a submersible pump and some electric heaters. The gas company man came and told me the gas company won't do anything because of "liability issues." (I bit my tongue and continue to bite it.)
So... as I write, the pump is pumping, the electric heater is heating, and my tax accountant has my Quicken file in his inbox.
Are we having fun yet?
We've hiked, we've climbed, we've endured sleet and snow. We've worked far into the night putting frames on our paintings, photographing them, cataloging them and pricing them. We've written about them, advertised them and promoted them. We've moved mountains, not to mention furniture, to display them.
Our Cummins Falls exhibit hit the ground running last night. In the face of thunderstorms and tornadoes, the artists and the patrons made their way to the exhibit hall where they ate, drank, visited and looked at the art.
Everyone was enthusiastic about Cummins Falls and a few people even bought paintings! This show did not bring in as much money as some of our others. We can speculate why, but the factors are usually beyond my comprehension.
I am confident that the adventures and photographs which our artists have shared will be published. I am certain that this effort has brought the Chestnut Painters into a new realm of extreme plein-air painters, and that our reputation will precede us as serious artists.
Congratulations, all of you, on a fabulous job! Your art, your efforts, your volunteerism and your professionalism absolutely shine. I am proud to be a Chestnut.
Do outdoor painters do the entire body of their landscape work outside? Sometimes. I know of artists who paint large-scale paintings completely outdoors, using paint tubes loaded into caulking guns.
But sometimes an artist will go into the studio to finish a painting begun outdoors, sometimes to make an enlargement of an outdoor painting, and sometimes to make a new painting entirely from sketches and photos taken on location.
I like to do a number of oil sketches outside, and draw from those plus my memory -- and sometimes a black-and-white photo -- to do a larger painting. The larger painting is not usually a straight blowup of the small sketch. Usually I'm experimenting with techniques and colors to more fully express my experience while I was in nature.
While painting on location at Cummins Falls, I was impressed by two things: one was the depth of the gorge (as you may have noticed in my post Fun With Gravity) and the other was the beautiful color of the water. It was the kind of blue-green I have only seen at Glacier Park and Switzerland. I wanted to do a larger painting which would downplay the whiteness of the foaming water, and incorporate that beautiful turquoise color throughout. I also wanted to emphasize the plunging perspectives of this gorge.
In order to do that, I made some pencil sketches from memory. Then I matched the color of the water which I had used for the on-location sketches. Third, I made a black-and-white print to help me with specifics of the geology. You can see in this photo how I had those references set up on my wall easel.
Creating the painting was that kind of creative process which involves lots of decisions and adjustments. The basic method was the same as that which I showed you in "Oil Sketches." I roughed in the composition in brown, and glazed the blue into the pool directly on the white canvas. The waterfall is violet, followed by successively paler tints of blue, with white placed on the highlights at the end.
The trees on the left side required some experimentation, as I wanted to keep them unfocused but believable.
The Chestnut Group of painters have been at Cummins Falls for a number of days now. Tomorrow is our last day. Many of us have gone into the framing stage of this project. The exhibit is next week -- we have been working hard, and I hope we sell ALL of these beautiful paintings! You can see some of them at this facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Friends-of-The-Chestnut-Group/158817197486154
A long time ago (and far, far away) some artists decided they wanted to make sketches in color rather than in pencil. They used their paints for this, but they were just taking quick notes -- called color notes -- and the paintings were not intended to be finished works of art.
A funny thing happened: these oil color sketches glowed with a fresh vitality which was often missing in the finished art. Buyers started asking for the sketches, and a new art form was born.
The picture of the waterfall that I showed you last week is one such sketch. You haven't heard from me for a while because I've been doing more sketches of the waterfall, as well as a large finished painting of the same falls. This was a deadline matter!
But now I"m back. Yesterday my fiance gave me a dozen roses for Valentine's day, and my gift to him is an oil sketch of those roses. To see a slideshow of the oil sketch process, go to my Facebook page at Gayle Levee.
